The genius behind the lawn at Chatsworth was Capability Brown (1716-1783). In the course of…
Politics Influenced Modern English Garden
Politics influenced modern English garden.
One would think that politics is the farthest thing from any sort of garden style or fashion.
A garden is, after all, about the design of a piece of land with plants.
Tim Richardson in his book The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden makes the point that the English garden change called the ‘landscape garden’ in the early 1700s was linked to the political environment in England.
At that time the English garden developed a ‘modern’ style that changed the English garden forever. The style included a more natural look, less tied to the precise pruning of the Dutch contribution to landscape at that time.
The poet Alexander Pope, the nurseryman Thomas Switzer, and others sought to express a new form of landscape design.
The new English landscape had the opposition between the Tories and Whigs to thank for its emergence.
Richardson says, “[In the 1680s and 1690s] those in favor of a Protestant succession to the throne – and the businesslike ordering of national affairs that came with it – realized that the treatment of the land itself, including gardens, could be assumed as a powerful emotional and economic argument in favor of Whig ideas of progress and patriotism.”
More creative, intellectual British aristocrats considered the earlier formal, symmetrical garden design of an ‘Anglo-Dutch’ manner that preceded the early 1700s, unsuitable to a modern nation.
This group of new landscapers, led by Pope, sought to express themselves in redesigning the garden.
Richardson writes, “Pope’s ideas were to shape the form of the landscape garden in decades to come.”
“The landscape garden did not arise out of a progression of Taste, as the Whigs would have us believe, but out of an explosion of intellectual creativity,” says Richardson.
If Richardson’s argument is accepted, and in the book he presents evidence to make that point, we have much to be grateful for in the struggle between the two political factions of England in the early 1700s.
The elements of surprise and variety also became the qualities that accompanied the new landscape garden. The artist William Kent emerged as a major force in designing properties with the new landscape garden look.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both preferred this new landscape garden style on their properties in Virginia.
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